Maybe it was the aftermath of adrenaline; maybe it was a surge of contrition. But something made me blurt out, “Do you know anything about the Arcadia Project?”
After a moment of incomprehension, Dr. Davis’s face suddenly hardened into an expression I’d never seen. “No,” she said, like a snuffer on a candle. Not the no of ignorance, the no of don’t even think about it.
“So . . . you have heard of it.”
“I assume Caryl Vallo came to see you.”
I blinked. “You know her?” I said instead of, She’s real?
“Did she claim to be affiliated with the Center?” At the very thought, she seemed to be rapidly approaching anger level six: Incensed.
“Not at all. She said something about the Department of Mental Health. She didn’t mention this place.”
Dr. Davis exhaled.
“Who is she?” I prodded. “Is it some kind of scam?” Icy fingers of disappointment stroked my breastbone at the thought.
Dr. Davis rubbed the heel of her hand over her forehead. “No, they are state funded, at least in part, they’ve been around for decades, and there has never been any scandal around them that I could find.” She turned doe eyes on me. “But they’ve—they’ve taken people from us in the past, people we could have helped.”
“Isn’t getting us out of here the general idea?”
She shook her head, clearly frustrated. “What they offer isn’t healing. They all—they live together; there’s this intense secrecy. The whole operation looks like some sort of cult, but there has never been enough justification to investigate. I can’t be more specific without breaking patient confidentiality, but they’ve interfered before, once with a little girl I had invested a great deal in. I care about you, too, Millie, and I feel you could make real progress here, given enough time.”
“Speaking of time,” I said, pointing to the clock on the wall. We’d gone ten minutes over, which meant she was keeping someone else waiting. She was paid to say she cared, so I never believed it, but clocks don’t lie, and this one said she was holding on past the point she should have let go. That in and of itself made me feel that I ought to get as far away as possible.
Dr. Davis sighed and ran her fingers through her hair; it fell back to sleek perfection. “My job is not to tell you what to do,” she said. “My job is to help you find the answers for yourself.”
“I understand.”
“Then understand what it costs me to say this: leave the Arcadia Project alone. Please, just leave it be.”
3
At eighteen, I drove two thousand miles west toward the siren call of Hollywood, hoping it would drown out the cruel voice in my head that I thought was my father’s. By the time I found out that the cruel voice in my head was my own, my father was two years dead and I’d already let the voice talk me off the roof of Hedrick Hall. Whoops.
That song had been silent ever since, silent until Caryl brought it back, and I bitterly regretted telling Dr. Davis about her. After a year spent following orders and eating institutional food, a dose of reality was exactly the last thing I needed.
Don’t get me wrong; neither Davis, dead father, nor demons had the power to talk me out of meeting Caryl Vallo that Tuesday. But they did manage to leach some of the joy out of my first sight of Los Angeles in months.
“June gloom” was in full effect, draping the sky in silver mink, but it was early enough in the month that a few lacy blooms lingered on the jacaranda trees. After six months of the Leishman Center’s relentless beige, the violet glow of the petals sang through my every nerve. I kept trying to frame them, to set up a shot in my mind, but I’d been too long without a camera, and the trees slipped by too quickly.
I felt like a tourist in my own city. The cabdriver took the Fourth Street exit off the 10, and I made a nose print on the window trying to see everything at once. Fourth Street ran parallel to the ocean; at every intersection the western horizon flashed by like chrome.
A little ways south we entered a residential district, where the streets were lined with pastel stucco apartments. The cab pulled in beside the tiny park where Caryl had arranged to meet me. The inviting patch of green sloped down toward Main Street and the sea.
I got carefully out of the cab, relying on my hands and my right knee to get me to a standing position, then grabbed my cane off the seat and used it to steady me as I went around the back of the cab. I hadn’t tried using my prosthetic legs on anything but hospital tile, and I didn’t trust my balance.